Investigations of radical political thought and action have been a major preoccupation in the field of modern South Asian history for the past several decades. The organizing question of these scholarly debates has been how and to what extent an insurgent consciousness may be produced out of the variegated conditions of domination and subordination of capitalist modernity in the non-West. The educator and social reformer Jotirao Phule encountered similar issues in his efforts to transform lower-caste consciousness in late nineteenth-century colonial Maharashtra. Phule is remembered for his establishment of several schools for lower-caste children as well as for his founding of the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873; however, Vendell’s essay primarily addresses Phule’s intellectual contributions around the problem of subaltern consciousness in three major texts: Gulamgiri (1873), Shetkaryacha Asud (1882), and Sarvajanik Satya Dharmapustak (1891). This essay argues that Phule’s project is best understood as an attempt to produce new strategies for observing, apprehending, and making judgments about the phenomenal and social world by interrogating inherited forms of knowledge. He suggested that a critical account of the ways in which fabricated symbolic devices produce a dramatic loss of one’s grasp on the given world was a necessary precondition for the inculcation of satyashodh (truth seeking), which named a deliberate practice of inquisitive self-making without determinate end. Satyashodh was an innovative practice of mind, though one that encountered limits when it entered the field of right conduct, which had been shaped most powerfully for Phule by the example of Protestant Christianity. His long struggle to elaborate a strategy for transforming the world by transforming oneself represents a powerful example of insurgent thought within the global history of slavery and emancipation in the British imperial world.
Scribes in early modern South Asia relied on their skill in writing to secure the support of powerful courtly patrons. The rapid expansion of emerging regional states in the eighteenth century created new opportunities to apply these skills to administration, land-holding, and politics. This article examines the changing professional identity of the Kayastha scribal household in eighteenth-century western India. I focus on the ascendancy of the Chitnis household of Satara in the context of the growth and diversification of Kayastha employment under the Maratha sovereign Shahu Bhonsle (1682–1749). By consolidating portfolios of titles, appointments, and rights to property, ambitious scribes and secretaries, as epitomised by the career of Govind Khanderao Chitnis (d. 1785), were able to pursue riskier and more lucrative political assignments and form networks of kinsmen and associates across Maratha governments. Yet greater scrutiny and competition for state largesse, not least from within the Chitnis household itself, forced members of later generations to adopt creative and sometimes risky strategies to defend their claims to property. This article explores how the profound dislocations of political transformation in eighteenth-century South Asia enabled distinctive modes of individual and collective self-fashioning amongst skilled, upwardly mobile groups.
This essay examines the role of Indian-language documentation in the production of legality in colonial western India, focusing on the workings of the Bombay Inam Commission (1852-1863). It situates legal validation of claims to tax-free land revenue within the broader process of securing, organizing, classifying, and registering Marathi- and Persian-language documents. Combating the effects of rain, dirt, and pests on old state records often sold as “waste paper,” the Inam Commission deployed material interventions to secure a legal archive for verifying individual claims to property. While such evidence weighed heavily in the evaluation of the testimony and corroborating documents of an individual claimant’s case-file, questions of writing also shaped the legal reasoning of the Commission. Inquiries about any given document’s conformity to or deviation from conventional style figured prominently in judgments about its authenticity. The scribe Sayyid Usman’s investigation in 1856 of a date in a Persian document attributed to the Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan struggled to establish the parameters of conventional style against the plurality of entangled regimes of property. I argue that a material approach to writing allows us to better understand the imperfect and dispersed production of legal truth in imperial settings.
Diplomacy was a principal site of linguistic and cultural exchange in the early modern Persianate world. Focusing on the karārnāmā or agreement, this paper explores how a repertoire of Marathi and Persian documentary genres, binding formulae, and graphic procedures enabled legal, commercial, and diplomatic transactions in eighteenth-century western India. The exchange of written agreements facilitated interstate relations as well as profit-sharing contractual arrangements between individuals. Despite their centrality to interactions between European and South Asian polities, these instruments met with limited success in establishing rights to property under the legal regime of the East India Company-state and instead acquired new functions in colonial revenue administration.
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